Interview: Mark Little discusses JBoss EAP 6

We talk with the leader of JBoss’s technical direction about their most recent big release and JBossWorld 2012

JAX:You’ve just come off the back of JBossWorld 2012 –
how was that?

Mark Little: It was great. The biggest JBossWorld I can
recall, with a lot of buzz around things like EAP 6, JBoss Data
Grid and the JBoss Way announcements we made last week. It was
really nice to hear people talking about the JBoss mojo
again!

You spoke on your
blog of this, JBoss EAP 6, being the most important release for
some time. Can you give more insight into how long planning for EAP
6 took, how many JBossians were involved and why you believe it is
a pivotal release in JBoss history?

Well planning for EAP 6 started before we had released EAP
5. So in that sense it’s been in the works for over 3 years.
However, real engineering effort didn’t begin until late 2009 when
we started the work on what would become the JBoss Modular Service
Container – the heart of AS7. In terms of how many people have been
involved in the EAP 6 development and release, I’d estimate close
to 200 when you include the community involvement we’ve
had.

As to why I believe EAP 6 is a critical release for us,
it’s a combination of things: first we have proven that EE6 doesn’t
require bloated implementations; secondly we’ve shown that
standards such as CDI, which we drove, are a great basis for
simplifying the development of enterprise Java
applications.

Obviously it has been a few years since the last EAP 6 –
how have you adapted this time round to accommodate the changes in
technology?

The last major EAP release was EAP 5 in 2009. At that point
we were just starting to see cloud really taking off. Also mobile
and embedded devices were still not considered the domain of
enterprise applications. Today cloud is everywhere and ubiquitous
computing has entered the enterprise age. So we needed to ensure
that EAP 6 would not only be cloud ready from the start so that
it’d be running on OpenShift, but also that we could use it as the
basis for work we’re doing on mobile and embedded. The lightweight
nature of EAP 6 helped us in both cases.

What have you learnt from the JBoss AS7 release and
implemented here?

That it’s possible to build an EE6 application server that
supports the Full Profile and can run unmodified in the Cloud and
on constrained devices. It’s running on a Raspberry Pi, for
instance! And we spent a lot of the last 3 years looking at how we
can improve developer productivity for EAP releases as well as
simplify things such as configuration management. So many of the
improvements in EAP 6 and AS7 are because of related technologies
such as JBoss Developer Studio.

How did the Early Access Program help you and the team in
the long-run when gauging opinion for EAP6?

We got a lot of good feedback from our community users
when we released AS7 last year and AS7.1 earlier this year.
However, we often find that our enterprise customers put our
platforms through things that we don’t typically get with
community. So it was good to get their feedback and it helped us to
prioritise some feature development over other
aspects.

It seems that JBoss EAP and in Red Hat in general have
positioned themselves well for cloud environments. Can you explain
what is new in EAP6 to help users get their applications in the
cloud?

As I mentioned previously, EAP 6 has been designed to be
cloud-ready from the start. With the fast boot times, below 3
seconds for the Full Profile, and minimal footprint, this allows us
to get the high densities needed on Cloud for PaaS. We’ve also been
working very closely with the OpenShift team for well over a year
to ensure that every deployment of AS7 and now EAP 6 is integrated
with the work they’re doing on payments, dynamic clustering,
fail-over etc.

Furthermore, the JBoss Developer Studio/JBoss Tools team
has worked with then OpenShift team to seamlessly integrate PaaS
deployments into our Eclipse environment – it really is as simple
as a single click to deploy into EAP 6 running in
OpenShift!

How does OpenShift fit into this? How important is it to
link EAP6 and OpenShift together for JBoss looking into the
future?

The future for a lot of developers is the Cloud and we
believe that OpenShift and EAP6 are the right PaaS. Lots of other
things we’ll be bringing to OpenShift, such as BRMS and SOA-P,
layer on EAP so having a solid basis on which to work is important
for much more than just the EE6 users who will be taking advantage
of EAP 6.

What were some key design goals heading into the project –
what did you feel the need to improve upon?

Lightweight, fast, dynamic adaptability, easier to
understand and use. I think we delivered on all of
these.

Can you tell us more about how it links up with other
JBoss/Red Hat products?

As with previous EAP releases, EAP 6 will be the basis for
all of our platforms. So whether it’s SOA Platform, Data Grid, or
Portal, they’ll all use EAP 6 in one way or another. This means
that their users will get the benefits I’ve mentioned
already.

In terms of middleware, what has been improved upon and
which middleware components in JBoss EAP6 excite you the
most?

We’ve improved upon a lot in EAP 6 from previous releases,
but the ones that really excite me the most include the new JBoss
Modular Services Container (it’s key to our ability to be
lightweight and have lightning fast boot times), CDI (via Weld and
soon DeltaSpike) and Infinispan (yes, there are aspects of our data
grid technology within the EAP 6 base platform).

The JBoss Way initiative was announced at the recent
JBossWorld – can you explain what it is and the thinking behind
this?

I think it’s much easier if people watch the
videos. However, in summary the JBoss Way is our attempt
to bring together the masses of information we’ve accumulated over
the years, but from our own teams, community involvement and
customers, and present the best ways to accomplish various tasks.
So the JBoss Way will include things like best practices,
tutorials, quickstarts etc. It’ll also impact the way in which our
projects and products progress in the future as we make a conscious
decision to think about the JBoss Way from the start rather than in
retrospect.

Has planning already begun for JBoss EAP 7 – it might be
early to say but what sort of features can we expect
there?

Yes, planning has started. I was in a 3 day long meeting last
week with some of the engineerings teams involved in this. As we’re
an open source company, the things we discussed and the plans we’re
developing will appear in the community very soon for feedback. But
I think some of the things you can expect to see will include EE7
support and more emphasis on a JBoss fabric, which we discuss at
the JBossWorld 2011
keynote.

Dr. Mark Little leads JBoss technical direction, research and development. Prior to this he was SOA technical development manager, and director of standards. He was chief architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, and Distinguished Engineer at Hewlett Packard when Arjuna was spun off. He has worked in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80s. His PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. He is currently also a professor at Newcastle University.